Twitter can be a useful marketing tool for businesses – not only as a way to get out your message and connect with customers, but it can be helpful in learning about the needs and opinions of your fan base and in turn, allowing you to refine your brand to better meet their needs.

When on Twitter, your challenge is to capture attention in 140 characters or less. The content must be useful and interesting, and closely related to your industry topic. A few possible approaches include:

Linking to an outside article, story, photo, video or other media

Linking to your news -- a blog post, article, or press release

Linking to free gifts, contests, or events

Promotions: sales, coupons, time-sensitive offers

Comment about videos, case studies, lists, and how-to’s

Post a reaction to a trend or newsworthy topic

Offer inspirational quotes

Link to funny stuff

Share personal experiences

Stand Out

When designing a tweet, your objective is to get noticed and trigger a reaction. There are different approaches to achieving this level of engagement:

Come up with a concise but captivating headline

Be specific as to the nature of the content being delivered

Invoke curiosity

Solve a problem

Create a sense of urgency

Address what’s in it for them

And always, keep it as short as possible!

Links

With outbound links, let users know what kind of content you are linking to, be it a video, cartoon, blog post, etc. To make use of every character you have on Twitter, you should use a URL shortening service like bitly.com. Another benefit of using these URL shorteners is that it enables you to track clicks on each link you tweet. This way, you’ll have data to supports testing variations, so you can make improvements.

Studies

A recent study by done by Dan Zarella of Hubspot showed there is a higher conversation rate when a link is placed at a point of 25% of the overall length of the tweet.

Additionally, according to the Bitly blog, studies support that the best time to post tweets is in the afternoon, earlier in the week (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. And don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter isn’t so effective on weekends.

Using Hashtags

Hashtags are how people find information on Twitter. This feature is used to bring up specific tweets based on a hashtag keyword. The hashtag should be relevant to the content, which in turn should be relevant to the topic of the Twitter account. There are two ways hashtags can be added 1.) by adding it to words within a headline, and 2.) by using popular, relevant keywords with a hash tag at the end of a tweet.

All–in-all, at Driven Internet Marketing, when it comes to Social Media Management, it’s our recommendation that you try different variations of posting on Twitter to better determine what kinds of content generate a higher response from your audience.